It was hard for me to develop an appreciation for poetry. I love
reading books mainly because I love exploring the motivations of the
characters. I love music because often the words seem so full of
meaning because of the harmonics put behind the words. But when the two
combine in poetry, I feel at an utter loss. The words fail to take on
meaning and there is rarely a set of characters to analyze. Recently
I’ve made a little progress with the help of one particularly poetic
friend senior year, but one sentence in Liz’s post I believe holds the
key (at least for me) to poetry: “Every capitalization, every comma,
every space, every syllable, it must all be calculated.” TO me this
means that a poem is basically an extraordinarily unified grouping of
words and syntax. In other words, a poet has to know everything he or
she wants to say before the first words are even formulated in his or
her mind. A poem must be viewed as a whole. Taking this into account, I
feel that I may finally be able to understand poetry just a little.
When reading “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” by Keats, I felt
it was a nice reflection, but also strongly felt I was missing
something. After reading the text following the poem, I understood that
the poem “was originally a gift for his [Keat’s] friend” (Bump 137).
Once put in context, the poem takes on a whole other meaning. It is
definitely one of the most beautiful thank-you notes ever written. But
it at the same time is less personally applicable to a wide audience.
Another main issue I personally have with poetry is the need to show
your emotions, not be afraid to cry or laugh or be moved; in short, to
be vulnerable, like we talked about Tuesday in class. I love reading
poems alone or with a certain group of friends who know me well, but to
discuss lines like some of those in “The Lotus-eaters” by Tennyson with
a class makes me feel really disconnected. The beautiful ideas in the
poetry are expressed with words and syntax masterfully, but I can’t
master the language the same way and thus find myself frustrated when
trying to make an argument about a poem. For instance, the lines “And
in the stream the long-leaved flowers weep,/ And from the craggy ledge
the poppy hangs in sleep.” (Lines 55-56, 150) convey a powerful meaning
to me and I’m sure to someone else in our class, but I feel that we
could never connect and understand the significance of the line to the
other without first understanding a great deal of the events weighing
on that person’s conscious (or subconscious). So, in short, I feel like
reading poetry is a wonderful experience if you devote time and effort
to it, but it is too personal to adequately share with an
acquaintance.
This may seem strange, but this graphic illustrates how I have come to feel about poetry and encapsulates poetry's beauty in a strange but straightforward way:
Let
me explain: The two weird little people in the middle seem content to
me. They seem satisfied to me because of the simplicity with which they
are portrayed. And the words around them show that they are completely
comfortable in the knowledge that they are joined in disjunction: THat
although they will never fully understand the other person and thus are
isolated permanently, they find comfort in the fact that their is
another person who also feels the beautiful power of the isolation.
Hope that kinda made sense. A little.